Google is expanding its App Engine Web-apps platform to something called App Engine for Business. The most interesting part of this little piece of news is that Google has joined with VMware to create a platform in which developers can create applications in Java and then launch those apps on multiple cloud platforms -- not just on Google's cloud platform. Score one for multi-platform capability and a bit of openness here.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 20, 20100 comments
Many of us won't have to worry about this, but it's worth noting nonetheless. The problem here involves Windows 7 64-bit, Windows Server 2008 R2 for 64-bit systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 Itanium operating systems, as Jabulani Leffall ably explains for RCPmag.com.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 20, 20100 comments
So, partners, when you go into an IT shop and sell the convenience, low costs and easy maintenance of cloud computing, have you ever thought that you might be selling a bunch of the shop's IT staff into unemployment? That's what a lot of IT people think is happening, anyway. But our friends in IT shouldn't worry. They can prepare themselves for the cloud revolution. How? Well, they'll just have to click here to find out.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 19, 20100 comments
In another positive sign that Vista is well and truly dead, customer satisfaction in Windows jumped recently on the back of Windows 7, the franchise player in Seattle that's actually delivering the goods.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 19, 20100 comments
More of this, please. Microsoft buddy and technology bellwether HP rocked Wall Street this week with better-than-expected earnings and says that the best is yet to come.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 19, 20100 comments
Is there an app (other than a DVR, we suppose) for turning off those "there's an app for that" iPhone ads? We'd be happy to never see another one again.
Oh, it's nothing against Apple or the iPhone itself. What we don't like is the way the ads make the iPhone seem like an absolutely indispensible element of modern life, when in truth a lot of what the overly happy voiceover characters in the ads are doing with their phones is also possible on a number of devices, including the simple laptop. Your editor struggles along daily without an iPhone and still manages to survive. We're sure that a lot of other folks do, too.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 19, 20107 comments
Another week, another loss (or settlement, anyway) in a patent case for Microsoft. This time, the price tag is $200 million, and Microsoft can make the check out to communications-security company VirnetX.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 17, 20100 comments
Google's reseller program for apps has more than 1000 partners, meaning the Microsoft rival has a teeny tiny fraction of the number of Office partners Microsoft has. But, hey, zero to 1000 in a little more than a year is pretty impressive, especially for a product that hardly costs anything.
Posted by Lee Pender on May 17, 20100 comments
Microsoft makes mistakes with Dynamics -- yes, we're complaining about the four suites again -- but its strategy for siphoning off market share from other vendors is dead on. We saw another example of that this week.
As SAP opened its huge Sapphire conference (now apparently called "Sapphire Now" in all capital letters, although we just don't feel like writing it that way) this week, Microsoft distributed a sneaky little press release about a connector between Microsoft Dynamics AX and SAP Business Suite.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 17, 20103 comments
Somewhere on the high seas, Larry Ellison is handing the captain's wheel to one of his acolytes and turning the volume up on CNBC. He’ll want to hear this news.
SAP, the big German ERP vendor and a rival to Ellison's Oracle, said this week that it will buy Sybase, a long-time Oracle foe in the database market, for $5.8 billion. This is a direct shot across Ellison's bow. For years, Oracle has dominated the database market, and it's been trying to siphon of some extra revenue by selling -- pretty successfully -- ERP and CRM in large part to its corporate database customers. Oracle has the enterprise applications, the database, the charismatic CEO -- when it comes to enterprise computing, Oracle has it all.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 13, 20102 comments
Great, another tablet computer is on the way. This one from Google and Verizon, apparently. We still don’t understand the fascination with tablets, but now that Apple has produced one, everybody has to have one, we suppose. Never mind that their usefulness seems limited and that they look utterly ridiculous…
Posted by Lee Pender on May 13, 20100 comments